Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 244 posts

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#211

Post by rsynnott »

zamadatix wrote: post #44
gerdesj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Please move away from the DV button - I like to encourage discussion around here] You forgot the conclusion. The prevailing opinion about the world's age is not 6000 years. I think some fundamentalist Christians might try for 4004 BC so 6000 years ... ish but I don't even know anyone who subscribes to that nonsense. I'm sure there are some who do but they are not my mates. They are certainly not general population.

I think you'd be surprised about how many really do believe the Earth is nearly that young https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati... "People you know" is a very unreliable way to get an idea about various populations. Regardless I think the comment was about applying current "solutions" to prior times and seeing if agrees with what we'd call a good solution in retrospective, not what people beli…

Some people do now (particularly in the US; while some form of creationism is somewhat common worldwide, literalist young earth creationism is mostly a big deal in some US protestant religions). But it's a fairly new invention as a semi-mainstream concept. It emerged in the 20th century.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#212

Post by rsynnott »

whatshisface wrote: post #188
philwelch wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if God created the universe 6,000 years ago and made everything seem as if it were older—I mean, that’s just a fundamentally unfalsifiable metaphysical hypothesis. For all we know, God did that last week or maybe 5 seconds ago. There’s nothing stopping that hypothesis from being true, it just makes, by definition, no measurable or practical difference and is hence irrelevant to scientific inquiry.

But that would go against how things are supposed to work according to the Bible: would God really be playing a big trick, aiming to deceive? A philosophically motivated abstract godlike being might be expected do that, but the Bible is a lot more specific than that about what God's like...

I mean, to account for the existence of stars over 6k light years away you basically have to embrace the "God is fucking with us" view anyway. It's the _only_ context in which YEC could work.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#213

Post by rsynnott »

litoE wrote: post #51
gerdesj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Please move away from the DV button - I like to encourage discussion around here] You forgot the conclusion. The prevailing opinion about the world's age is not 6000 years. I think some fundamentalist Christians might try for 4004 BC so 6000 years ... ish but I don't even know anyone who subscribes to that nonsense. I'm sure there are some who do but they are not my mates. They are certainly not general population.

I've heard the argument that God did create everything about 6,000 years ago in HIS reference frame but that due to relativistic time dilation/contraction its been 13+ billion years in OUR reference frame.

This is what happens when you alternate between reading the Bible and reading a Poul Anderson novel.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#214

Post by rsynnott »

caseysoftware wrote: post #45
gerdesj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Please move away from the DV button - I like to encourage discussion around here] You forgot the conclusion. The prevailing opinion about the world's age is not 6000 years. I think some fundamentalist Christians might try for 4004 BC so 6000 years ... ish but I don't even know anyone who subscribes to that nonsense. I'm sure there are some who do but they are not my mates. They are certainly not general population.

I think the implication was at the time this article was written that was a common belief. Therefore, the possibility that something was millions - or hundreds of millions - of years old would have been against the current orthodoxy and therefore would have been banned.

That's not really correct, though. Young Earth Creationism as a dogmatic point is a 20th centry invention; while people may have kind of assumed the world was pretty new in the 19th century it wasn't really orthodoxy.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#215

Post by rsynnott »

gorgoiler wrote: post #152

I was once at a tech conference for high schoolers in London where one of the distinguished speakers (others included Vint Cerf, and a UK government minister) told us that the primary reason the sun is hot was because it was still glowing with heat from the pressure of gravitational collapse. I think their claim was that the nuclear reactions in the sun contributed to the Sun’s radiation, but did not contribute to th…

Not true. Something like that is why gas giants are hotter than you'd naively expect, though.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#216

Post by detritus »

GurnBlandston wrote: post #206
colinmhayes wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas. A gigantic nuclear furnace.

The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma. The sun's not simply made out of gas, no, no, no.

It might be a bit too hot to smell bad...

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#217

Post by pdonis »

scatters wrote: post #160
pdonis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter that the article is bollocks. No, it isn't. It's correct in the basic claim of the title. Scientists in 1863 who believed that no known source of energy was capable of powering the Sun were right . The Sun is not powered by any source of energy that was known in 1863. > I would prefer if there was some more working shown to back up the article Scientific American wasn't the place to show the detai…

The article is using meteorites as an analogy; the model is of the Sun forming by gravitational contraction of a gas cloud, for which an r of infinity is appropriate. What's interesting is that the power available from solar fusion is of a similar order of magnitude to that available from gravitational contraction. But of course it must be, because if fusion was too powerful medium-mass stars wouldn't be able to form…

> What's interesting is that the power available from solar fusion is of a similar order of magnitude to that available from gravitational contraction.

No, it isn't; fusion provides much more energy per unit mass than gravitational contraction would for the Sun. As I calculated, gravitational contraction falling in from infinity to the current radius of the Sun provides about 2 x 10^11 Joules per kilogram. Fusion provides about 5 x 10^14 Joules per kilogram (the exact number depends on the particular fusion reaction).

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#218

Post by whatshisface »

philwelch wrote: post #207
whatshisface wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that would go against how things are supposed to work according to the Bible: would God really be playing a big trick, aiming to deceive? A philosophically motivated abstract godlike being might be expected do that, but the Bible is a lot more specific than that about what God's like...

Yeah but at that point you’re arguing theology.

Right, but YEC is theology. You were arguing theology from the beginning!

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#219

Post by philwelch »

whatshisface wrote: post #218
philwelch wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but at that point you’re arguing theology.

Right, but YEC is theology. You were arguing theology from the beginning!

I was just arguing a distinction between physical and metaphysical truth. My “theology”, such that it exists, is merely that God is fundamentally beyond human understanding and that we can’t meaningfully use human motivations or morality to model God’s actions.

Re: Experts Doubt the Sun Is Burning Coal (1863)

#220

Post by mrguyorama »

hutzlibu wrote: post #197

Articles like this, are a good reminder, to maybe not be tooo hard with the anti-science crowd. Or the ignorant about science crowd. It is all quite new, and probably take some more years, to sink in. So keep that in mind, the next time you discuss with anti-vaccers, anti climate change, ... as that level of ignorance can get depressing otherwise.

Nope, that's not even close. https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...

There's a HUUUUGE difference between "We have all this data and no theory to explain it all" that we had for the sun for a long time, and "I read something on twitter once that matches with an anecdote from uncle Buck that means vaccines cause autism"

Post reply on HN